Acceptance of the Indo-Hittite Family

"When in 1994 I wrote "Indo-Hittite Revisited" (Lehrman 1996), the
only accepted subgroupings of the Indo-European languages was the
schema in which Anatolian (Anat..) is a descendent of
Proto-Indo-European, like Indo-Iranian, Greek, Celtic, Germanic,
Tocharian, and the rest. The numerous oddities of Anatolian, which
could not in good faith be reconciled with Proto-Indo—European-as
reconstructed by the dominant scholars such as Watkins, Eichner,
Schindler, Rix, and their followers (Jasanoff, Melchert, Oettinger,
et. al.)-were explained as Anatolian losses, if considered seriously
at all. ."

"In his (Meid's 1975, 1990) hypothesis, the Anatolian rivulet left the
Indo-European riverbed much earlier than all the other known
Indo-European rivers and brooks, long before the mother river produced
the numerous innovations. Meid's hypothesis has enjoyed some
scholarly vogue-because it was not the "Indo-Hittite" family tree so
odious, for various unscholarly reasons, to so many (because
Sturtevant had not been a nice man; because it was hard for some, for
some to lose "-germanisch" in "Indogermanisch"; who knows what
else)-until I (Lehrman) managed to show, in the above-mentioned paper,
that Meid's river, if rid of the conceptual problems, was actually
Sturtevant and Cowgill's Indo-Hittite family tree in disguise. The
same is true of the Gamkrelidze-Ivanov "spatial an derivational"
subgrouping model (based on August Schleicher's schema) in which
Anatolian split off from the Proto-Indo-European unity before that
unity broke up into the Tocharian-Italic-Celtic subgroup, on the one
hand, and, on the other a subgroup much later becoming differentiated
into Aryan-Greek-Armenian subgroup and Balto-Slaic Germanic subgroup."

What I (Lehrman) find in 2000 is that many scholars have accepted the
Indo-Hittite theory in some form-either in name as well as in essence,
like Don Ringe (e.g. Ringe 1998) and Anna Morpugo Davies, or in
essence if not in name, as Craig Melchert has done. I am certainly
heartened by this quick change in perspective. I (Lehrman) see the IH
theory as capable of curing some of the grave ills in the current
reconstruction of PIE. These ills-phantoms and anachronisms-are sorely
in need of exorcism or correction, depending on whether one is dealing
with phantom sounds, such as the "laryngeals" in Proto-Indo-European
posited for purely structural, that is, cosmetic reasons, just because
some scholars, in line with their structuralist, and generativist
training, prize economy and symmetry above else, or whether one is
dealing with roots and suffixed which those scholars freely slice
apart or splice together because, in line with the nominalist
worldview instilled by the same structuralist and generativist
training, they see reconstruction as little more than a collection of
mnemonic, or virtual, formulae rather than an honest-to-goodness
attempt to reconstruct , with all due caution and humility, actual
words of a prehistoric language (Lehrman 2001, p. 107-107)."

End quote.

This has important implications for Indo-Euroepan linguists (or should
we say Indo-Hittite linguists?). For one, all the dates will have to
be pushed back to allow for the initial branching of Proto-Anatolian
and the PIE with subsequent subranching of PA. Secondly, the
Proto-Anatolian Homeland questions becomes a dichotomy; Anatolia or
elsewhere.

Lehrman, Alexander (2001), "Reconstructing Proto-Indo-Hittite," in
Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, Robert Drews
(ed.), Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Number 38.